Eminent Victorians, collection of short biographical sketches by Lytton Strachey, published in 1918.. Strachey’s portraits of Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Charles “Chinese” Gordon revolutionized English biography.Until Strachey, biographers had kept an awestruck distance from their subjects; anything short of adulation was regarded as disrespect. Rather than being a man with his nation's support, Gordon is revealed to be a lone wolf whose military brilliance was often at odds with the political policy of the day. Strachey also mocks Arnold's efforts at moral improvement of the general public, for example his unsuccessful weekly newspaper. Respected and revered Major-General Charles George Gordon does not fare much better in Strachey's assessment. Each of the lives is very different from the others, although there are common threads—for example the recurrent appearance of William Ewart Gladstone and Arthur Hugh Clough. Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had until then been regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon (although Nightingale is actually praised and her reputation was enhanced). Not affiliated with Harvard College. Gordon’s is the story of a maverick soldier and adventurer, whose original military achievements in China would have been forgotten. Cardinal Manning * Florence Nightingale * Thomas Arnold * General Gordon Lytton Strachey's biographical essays on four 'eminent Victorians' dropped a depth-charge on Victorian England when the book was published in 1918. Strachey describes this as an education based on chapel and the classics, with a prefectorial system to maintain order. He reads her poem and is very impressed by it; he promises to have it published with excellent reviews. He refused to withdraw despite orders to the contrary, instead setting in for a siege that caught the British government off-guard, and ended in almost total disaster. GradeSaver, 23 September 2018 Web. Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians, once quipped that "[t]he history of the Victorian Age will never be written.We know too much about it." The Eminent Victorians Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. The Question and Answer section for Eminent Victorians is a great He changed his views and concluded that the Victorian worthies had not just been hypocrites, but that they had bequeathed to his generation the "profoundly evil" system "by which it is sought to settle international disputes by force". Eminent Victorians study guide contains a biography of Lytton Strachey, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. The author of the book declares these figures to be 'characteristic specimens' of the age. He chose not to write about her because he could not find sufficient material about her. this section. He became known, not merely as a Headmaster, but as a public man. This detailed literature summary also contains Bibliography on Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD: Lytton Strachey (1880–1932). The book shows its other subjects in a less than flattering light; for instance, the intrigues of Cardinal Manning against Cardinal Newman. Up until that point, as Strachey remarked in the preface, Victorian biographies had been "as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of slow, funereal barbarism." There she meets Nick Greene, who is now the most eminent Victorian literary critic. Read 2 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. In November 1912 he wrote to Virginia Woolf that their Victorian predecessors "seem to me a set of mouth bungled hypocrites". Barbour, Polly. Matthew Arnold, being one of the most eminent Victorian poets, minutely captures the cultural, moral and ethical decomposition existing in the Victorian era of doubts and disbelief. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian--ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the He was often sent into enemy territory on secret missions by the British government. It is brilliant, delicious, exquisitely civilized. Dr Arnold is hailed as an exemplar who established the Public School system. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. The final disaster was when the Egyptian occupation of Sudan was almost completely overthrown by fundamentalist rebels, and someone was needed to retrieve the situation in Khartoum. Andrew Norman Wilson wrote a book Eminent Victorians and so did Lytton Strachey, but in the early 1900s, thereby confirming Strachey as an Eminent Victorian himself. William Grimes, "Books of the Times: Meet the Mrs Who Organized the Domestic Engineers", The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell By Bertrand Russell, Nicholas Griffin 2002, Roy Hattersley New Statesman 12 August 2002, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eminent_Victorians&oldid=947229896, Articles with dead external links from March 2020, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Various imprints and editions of the book at, This page was last edited on 25 March 2020, at 02:07. Cardinal Manning. Follow the "All Files: HTTP" link in the "View the book" box to the left to find XML files that contain more metadata about the original images and the derived formats (OCR results, PDF etc. Complete summary of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Even the very period of Victorianism itself stands challenged: historians no longer refer unquestioningly to the "Victorian Age" as the precise years associated with the monarch but instead concentrate on a shorter period — a "high age" — from about 1830 to 1880. The present text is a part of the famous book Eminent Victorians (1918) written by Lytton Strachey. What do these eminent Victorians have in common? Andrew Norman Wilson wrote a book Eminent Victorians and so did Lytton Strachey, but in the early 1900s, thereby confirming Strachey as an Eminent Victorian himself. After you claim a section you’ll have 24 hours to send in a draft. Arnold was both teacher and historian, and was primarily responsible for the development of the English private school (known as public schools in Britain). Well, not much, according to the life histories detailed within the book. Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey (one of the older members of the Bloomsbury Group), first published in 1918 and consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. Each story is very different and is a reflection of the background events before which it takes place. With the publication of Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey set out to breathe life into the Victorian era for future generations to read. Also watch these videos for more topics.links are given below. Influenced by Sigmund Freud, Strachey depicts Florence Nightingale as an intense, driven woman who is both personally intolerable and admirable in her achievements.[3]. He points out that it was not Arnold who was responsible for the obsession with sport, but does make it clear that Arnold was at fault in ignoring the sciences. The biographies of these famous Victorians are hardly exhaustive but focus on only the most important aspects of each life. resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. For example, Cardinal Manning's story summarizes how the Oxford Movement came to take place. Copyright © 1999 - 2020 GradeSaver LLC. Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey Self publishing services to help professionals and entrepreneurs write, publish and sell non-fiction books on Amazon & bookstores (CreateSpace, Ingram, etc). In this book 4 portraits are presented of 4 well-known Victorians, each representing a certain part of society. The British government was put in an almost impossible dilemma, and when eventually they did send a relief expedition it arrived just two days too late. [4], Bertrand Russell wrote from Brixton Prison (where he was imprisoned for his anti-war campaigning) to Gladys Rinder on 21 May 1918:[5][6]. The American critic Edmund Wilson wrote in the New Republic of 21 September 1932, not long after Strachey's death, "Lytton Strachey's chief mission, of course, was to take down once and for all the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral superiority... neither the Americans nor the English have ever, since Eminent Victorians appeared, been able to feel quite the same about the legends that had dominated their pasts. Read the Study Guide for Eminent Victorians…, Florence Nightingale in 'Eminent Victorians': A Study of Characteristics and Meaning, View Wikipedia Entries for Eminent Victorians…. Eminent Victorians book. You'll get access to all of the Eminent Victorians content, as well as access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. Strachey was one of the influential members of Bloomsbury Group, a loosely associated group of English writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who shared and propagated a common view of life in the early 20 th century England. Something had been punctured for good.". The high church basically dictated the theology and liturgy of the church, and so were an extremely influential body of men (and they were always men - women were believed to have no place in the high church). Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end. Strachey developed the idea for Eminent Victorians in 1912, when he was living on occasional journalism and writing dilettante plays and verse for his Bloomsbury friends. will review the submission and either publish your submission or provide feedback. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey ... Queen Victoria herself possessed a copy, in which several passages were marked in pencil, by the royal hand. He is also credited with the development of structured sports in schools, particularly rugby, but Strachey contends that this emphasis on the importance of physical education would have happened with or without him anyway. [1], By 1917, the work was ready for publication and Strachey was put in touch with Geoffrey Whitworth at Chatto. [2], By then it was wartime, and Strachey's anti-war and anti-conscription activities were taking up his time. One such mission was in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan at the time, and the place that gave Gordon his nickname. Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold : Summary and Analysis – Litbug Here we are looking at a detailed stanza-wise summary of Matthew Arnold ‘s Dover Beach. EMINENT VICTORIANS by Lytton Strachey Preface THE history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it. He developed schools that were run along military lines, in that there was a reliance on a prefect system where older boys maintained discipline amongst the younger ones. Even seemingly unshakeable axioms are prone to reassessment by historians, and Victorianism is no exception. So wrote Lytton Strachey in 1922; but he added, "Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past." Andrew Norman Wilson wrote a book Eminent Victorians and so did Lytton Strachey, but in the early 1900s, thereby confirming Strachey as an Eminent Victorian himself. Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey (one of the older members of the Bloomsbury Group), first published in 1918 and consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era.Its fame rests on the irreverence and wit Strachey brought to bear on three men and a woman who had until then been regarded as heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas … Manning does not come across as a very nice man in the book, rather, as a manipulative and underhand church politician. An editor Summary Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey’s wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. Eminent Victorians. Characteristics of Victorian novels. ). Thomas Arnold, the second man profiled in the book, does not fare much better in terms of the indictment of his general character. It replaced reverence with skepticism and Strachey's wit, iconoclasm, and narrative skill liberated the biographical enterprise. It is now 1901, and as King Edward VII succeeds Queen Victoria on the throne, … It ushered in the modern biography and raised the genre to the level of high literary art. Eventually he attained to an almost magical prestige. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey ... scenes of rage, desperation, towering courage, and summary execution. Using Freudian psychology to examine each subject’s neuroses, Strachey writes about Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold, and General Charles Gordon. Dr. Arnold's energies were by no means exhausted by his duties at Rugby. Lytton Strachey approached his subjects with scepticism rather than … Eminent Victorians was Strachey's counter-assault. The groundwork begun by Manning eventually led to the creation of Anglo-Catholicism, a denominational hybrid of Spanish Catholicism and English Anglicanism that would have Queen Elizabeth I turning angry cartwheels in her grave. Strachey based Gordon’s story on his diaries and letters to give an account of a strong individual almost at odds with the world. The Eminent Victorians Community Note includes chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quizzes written by community members like you. Eminent Victorians essays are academic essays for citation. Nightingale's accomplishments are all the more admirable when shown in context of the obstructive War Office, who were the department of the British government in charge of the administration of the army during World War One. 1918 Dr. Arnold. Strachey defied the tradition of "two fat volumes....of undigested masses of material" and took aim at the four venerated figures. Eminent Victorians-Lytton Strachey 2003 Eminent Victorians-Lytton Strachey 2019-05-08 Cornerstones-Lytton Strachey 2009 "The history of the Victorian Age will never be written; we know too much about it." The warder came to my cell to remind me that prison was a place of punishment. She is a woman before her time - strong, obstreperous and determined long before women were permitted to be so. The War Office was a classic example of the left hand having no idea what the right hand was doing, and against almost insurmountable odds, Nightingale saved the lives of the almost un-savable injured soldiers at the Front. British Labour politician Roy Hattersley wrote: "Lytton Strachey's elegant, energetic character assassinations destroyed for ever the pretensions of the Victorian age to moral supremacy.". This aspect is covered in depth to explain the movement and its main protagonists, particularly Manning's hostile relationship with John Henry Newman. Eminent Victorians begins with an account of the life of Cardinal Manning (1807-1892), a convert from the Church of England who became Archbishop of Westminster and the leader of England's Catholic community. You can help us out by revising, improving and updating The job fell to Gordon, whose instincts were to do anything but withdraw, and he became embroiled in a siege. The Oxford Movement was a movement comprising members of the High Church within the Church of England. He went to live in the country at East Ilsley and started work on a book then called Victorian Silhouettes containing miniature biographies of a dozen notable Victorian personalities. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey. I read most of the book at an emergency clinic, where I was stuck for almost twelve hours without food or drink. Strachey, in ‘Eminent Victorians’ reflects on the character of infamous historical heroine Florence Nightingale to cast the past lives of ordinary citizens, primarily women, as unsatisfactory and unfulfilling, and through this negative depiction of Victorian England, the author is able to uphold perceptions of the 20th century, through contrast, as a period of female liberation. VICTORIANISM. Eminent Victorians Contents: Cardinal Manning -- Florence Nightingale -- Dr. Arnold -- The end of General Gordon Language: English: LoC Class: DA: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: Great Britain, Ireland, Central Europe: Subject: Great Britain -- Biography Subject: Great Britain -- History -- Victoria, 1837-1901 -- Biography Subject Strachey is critical of Manning's underhand manipulations in attempting to prevent Newman being made a Cardinal. The critic Frank Arthur Swinnerton was taken with the work and it was published on 9 May 1918 with almost uniformly enthusiastic reviews.[1]. "Eminent Victorians Summary". Pretty impressive - unless you are Strachey, who portrays Gordon as more of a mercenary than a traditional soldier. He also favored an education that emphasized religious observance. In the following year he moved to Wiltshire where he stayed until 1915, by which time he had completed half the book. Florence Nightingale differs from the other subjects of the book because she is praised for both her actions and her general character. Eminent Victorians L.Strachey May 2-12, 2012 When Bertrand Russell read the book while in jail during the First World War he laughed so loud that he was admonished by his wardens that you were not supposed to have so much fun in jail. I often laughed out loud in my cell while I was reading the book. The metadata below describe the original scanning. However Wilson’s prose makes for an eminently more readable work, and in this panoramic study of the Victorian period he describes practically every single Victorian and historical event of the period worthy of note. Eminent Victorians is a groundbreaking work of biography that raised the genre to the level of high art. In Cardinal Manning's story, the background is the creation of the Oxford Movement and the defection of an influential group of Church of England clergy to the Catholic Church. In fact she was almost impossible to get along with on a personal level, but this only enhanced the success of her professional achievements. On May 9 1918, the book was published. I enjoyed as much as any the Gordon, which alone was quite new to me. The background features of Florence Nightingale's story are the machinations of the War Office, and the obtuseness of the military and politicians. All of which would seem to make him a hero of the modern education system, except for several glaring inadequacies; he didn't believe in science and so therefore never advocated teaching it, preferring the classics of Greek, history and literature. Fundamentalist rebels had overthrown the government of the time and Gordon was sent in to clear up the military mess that ensued. Eminent Victorians is a groundbreaking work of biography that raised the genre to the level of high art. The title of this quiz was taken from the book 'Eminent Victorians', published in 1918 by an early modernist who didn't like Victorians at all. The reviews were almost uniformly enthusiastic. After his research into the life of Cardinal Manning, he realised he would have difficulty managing twelve lives. Eminent Victorians (1918) is a collection of four short biographies by Lytton Strachey. When Manning went to Oxford University, he seemed set for a political career, but his hopes were dashed when his father was declared bankrupt. Walking at the head of his troops, with nothing but a light cane in his hand, he seemed to pass through every danger with the scatheless equanimity of a demi-God. eNotes plot summaries cover all the significant action of Eminent Victorians. Like many of his peers, Cardinal Manning was a truculent man and he did not particularly like working alongside his Anglican equivalents, particularly the influential John Henry Newman, whom he disliked so much that he worked behind the scenes to try and prevent him from becoming a Cardinal at all. Each story is set against a specific background. They were usually inclined towards being of improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. Although Arnold was revered at the time, in retrospect Strachey sees his approach as very damaging. Florence Nightingale, Monica E. Baly and H. C. G. Matthew. Book review: “Eminent Victorians” By Lytton Strachey August 29, 2012 Patrick T Reardon 0 Twenty years ago, a friend of mine, Steve Swanson, recommended Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians” as a classic in the field of biography — and a delightful read as well. Chatto had … These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. [1] One of the subjects he considered but rejected was Isabella Beeton. It replaced reverence with skepticism and Strachey's wit, iconoclasm, and narrative skill liberated the biographical enterprise. Also known as Gordon of Khartoum, he was a British army officer who made his name and reputation in the Crimean War, and in China, where he put down a rebellion and defeated forces twice the size and number of theirs. The book made Strachey's name and placed him firmly in the top rank of biographers. 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